Leather backed with fabric is known. U.S. Pat. No. 2,136,092 (Troy) discloses a method for laminating an elastic fabric in the stretched or extended state to thin, soft leather.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,269,923 (Vamos) discloses a stretchable laminate of thin, soft, stretchable leather and elastic fabric incorporating an elastomeric fiber. The laminate has a low elastic modulus to allow it to stretch with foot movement when it is used in a shoe. The laminate can be stretched in the range of 10% to 50% or more. The preferred elastic fabric has more stretch than the leather, is a "one-way" stretch fabric, and is applied to the skin so that its direction of stretch corresponds to the maximum stretch of the skin. Laminates so prepared as shoe uppers ("vamps") need to be trimmed in a separate operation to remove the outer circumference of the fabric.
It is also known that hides are nonuniform and have "lines of tightness" which generally run at right angles to the high-stretch directions in the hide. The lines of tightness are curved so that they are approximately parallel to the backbone in the center of the hide, where there is substantially no stretch at the backbone, and approximately perpendicular to the backbone near the neck and tail. The stretch can also veer off these arc-like lines in certain areas of the hide. This is described in the "Manual of Shoemaking", (C. &. J. Clark, Ltd., Somerset, England), 6th printing, 1989, pp. 94-101.
It is customary when laminating stretch fabric to a hide to lay a large piece of fabric over substantially the entire area of the skin. With such a method, some parts of the hide will have their maximum stretch aligned with the maximum stretch of the fabric, and some will be misaligned resulting in inadequate properties in the laminates, especially in the unload power and percent set of the laminate. The result is considerable waste of laminate or finished products having low durability and poor comfort or both.
The instant invention solves these problems by providing a method for cutting shaped parts of specifically engineered stretchable fabric and stretchable leather followed by laminating those portions of fabric and leather that have been cut to final shape so that all the fabric stretch is substantially aligned with the direction of maximum stretch of the leather resulting in a laminate of high comfort and quality.